Bye Bye 2008. Welcome 2009.

Boy, am I glad 2008 is over (well, almost over) and what a roller-coaster ride it has been. Everything from collapse of Lehman Brothers triggering the global financial meltdown to the Mumbai terror attacks unfolding live on TV affected all of us deeply in more ways than one. Personally too, a lot of things happened to my family and me that I'd rather forget. So, with a lot of optimism, I look forward to the new year ahead. For whatever it is worth, you can find a list of top 10 of everything in 2008 here.

Wish you all a happy and prosperous 2009.

Formatting high capacity disks with FAT32

I primarily use my PS3 as a media player rather than a gaming console. I like games but I hardly ever have time to play them.

I bought it in the US which meant that the console cannot play any non-NTSC or any DVD (including Blu-Ray) not from region 1. I decided to rip and encode all my region 2 DVDs to get them to play on PS3 and I figured I would need a 500 GB disk at the very least to dump all the encoded movies. So, I bought one and copied over some of the files I had already encoded.

But when I plugged it onto PS3's USB port, the hard disk did not show up. After a little bit of troubleshooting, I realized that the disk was formatted as NTFS which PS3 does not recognize. This was a bummer for a couple of reasons:

• I had to now reformat the disk to FAT32 and copy over all the movies once again (did I mention I was lazy? :-) )
  
• I also lose the ability to copy any file more than 4GB (the 32 in FAT32 refers to 32bit which is 2^32 or 4Gb).

Now, if only life were that easy. When I tried to format the disk to FAT32 using Windows XP, I realized there was no option to do so. The only option available was NTFS. After a lot of cursing and yelling at Microsoft and Sony for making me work this hard, I calmed down and started googling for solutions. I came across this support article by Microsoft on FAT32 limitations and why NTFS is better. But the point that got my attention was this:

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.

So, interestingly, it was the format tool in XP that was imposing the 32 GB limit and not the file system itself. Since, I only had an XP machine at my disposal, I did some search and found Ridgecrop's fat32format, a simple to use command line tool that gets the job done.

After downloading, extracting and running it (fat32format x: (where 'x' is the drive to format)), I had a 500 GB FAT32 partition. I had no problems copying the files over and watching them on PS3.

Why didn't I just format the disk to FAT32 on Mac? Well, I didn't have my MacBook Pro handy. Disk Utility would have made the task a cinch.

Boot Camp and BSOD

BSOD on my MBP

I have been using Boot Camp for a week now and never really had any issue with it until today. I experienced two bouts of BSOD in less than 10 minutes. Ironically, both the crashes happened when I was writing a blog post about my experience with Boot Camp. The BSOD was because Apple's Multitouch Trackpad drivers (applemtp.sys) and this appears to be a known issue.

I, honestly, never thought I would see a BSOD on my MBP ;-). But hey, when it can happen to the high and mighty, how can I, a mere mortal, be spared.

"Maharaja Yes"

I was randomly surfing the net today when I came across this blog. While the content was interesting, what was more interesting is that "important shock" was an anagram of the author's name.

It got me thinking, what kind of anagrams would my name generate. Googling for "anagram generator" took me to wordsmith.org's 'Internet Anagram Server'. I fired up the generator and here are some of the anagrams it generated for my name (Ajeya Sharma):

Maharaja Yes
Maharajas Ye
A Hearsay Jam
A Rajah Seamy
Area Ham Jays
...

Yeah, yeah, I have way too much time to kill :-)

ajeya.net is now live

I finally got around to registering ajeya.net today. It is live now !

I also took godaddy.com hosting services. I figured I could use some web space for experimenting with PHP and what not. So, I paid for the 150 GB Linux plan which set me back by $125.00 for 2 years. After a couple of hours of trying very hard and failing to convince myself that I needed all that space, I called godaddy.com customer support and canceled the hosting plan. I am glad I did because all I needed was to enable Google Apps for my domain which came with everything I want for now.

Setting up Google Apps for ajeya.net was a breeze and I had it working in less than 10 minutes. Google required me to confirm that I did own the domain. I did so by creating a CNAME host entry for a random string (provided by Google) and pointing that to google.com. With the domain ownership confirmed, the services were enabled immediately.

I then wanted to activate Gmail and was given instructions on setting up the MX records for my domain. After I updated the records at godaddy.com, it took an hour or so for the DNS records to propogate across the internet and for Gmail to work (I could login and compose a message but I could not send the message).

I now have Gmail for my own domain, along with Chat, Docs, Sites and Calendar. I am not really sure if I will ever use the other services but I enabled them anyway. The final step was to setup the landing page for my domain and for now it will be this blog.

So, welcome to ajeya.net!!

What's in a name

I had a very rough night yesterday. I wanted to register a domain name for myself. This would be my online identity.

I popped open the browser and went to godaddy.com and began the hunt for the perfect domain name. I wanted something catchy, something intelligent, something geeky.

I tried everything from rwxrwxrwx.com to ls-al.com to logn.com. Taken, taken and taken again. I got one or two names which were available like onlogn.com (O(nlogn)). But come on, that wouldn't serve the purpose. I wanted people to know I was a geek without me telling them.

So, after spending close to 5 hours searching for a perfect name, I am settling for ajeya.net. Something unimaginative, unoriginal, so cliché.

P.S: I came across this article in PC World. Interesting read.

Boot Camp

I have been a mac user for about two years now but never used 'Boot Camp' to install Windows on a Mac Book Pro because of some not so popular corporate security policies.

After I got the new machine, I didn't waste too much time. 

The experience was not really smooth for me. I wanted to install Windows XP Professional on a FAT32 partition so that I could easily access the partition from Mac OS X. I started by allocating 32 GB for the windows partition using BootCamp and and the installation started after a reboot. I could not get the bl**dy installation alway failed after the initial setup screen. 

Microsoft recommends a maximum of 32 GB for a FAT32 partition. During installation there is no way to get around this. After a bit of Googling, I decided to format the windows paritition with NTFS. But that did not work either. The initial installation would go through but after that I would get a 'bad disk' error.

I changed gears and made a backup copy of the XP install CD (before I get yelled at, I confirmed that this is legal since my original CD could be faulty). I tried the installation again with an NTFS paritition. This time I got 'could not find 'hal.dll' message. 

After a bit more googling, I saw several explanations for this including a corrupted boot.ini file. So, with a renewed gusto, I tried installing again. But this time I created a 20 GB FAT32 parition and continued. Lo and behold the installation went through fine.

After the installation, I just popped in the Leopard CD that came with the Mac and in less than 10 minutes I had everything working.

The trackpad did not work well even after the driver installs. This was  a known issue and a software update fixed it. 

I am not really sure if I really want to use XP but it is good to know I do have an option. When I have some time, I will install VMWare Fusion and check how well I can run XP off the boot camp parition.

Instructions for boot camp install are available here.

The new Mac Book Pro

It has been a while since my last post. I have been wanting to write a few reviews for quite a while but there were other things happening in my life which took precedence.

I got a the new MacBook Pro and I am already in love with it. The design is much better than the earlier version. The screen is bigger and the gesture support on the trackpad make things more interesting. You can find a good in-depth review on Ars Technica (Part1, Part2).